Agile and DevOps Wisdom

On Wednesday, January 30^th the OpEd “Why Minnesota can’t get MNLARS right” https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2019/01/why-minnesota-cant-get-mnlars-right/ was published resulting in a number of very thoughtful comments, many of them from Deputy Registrars. In reading through those comments, it became clear that the following 10 facts about the Minnesota Deputy Registrars would help the general public evaluate the Deputy Registrar responses.

1.           Minnesota has over 170 Deputy Registrars which employ approximately 1500 individuals across the State of Minnesota. About 2/3 of those offices are affiliated with a city or county and about 1/3 are private entities, which can be sold or inherited.

2.           Each Deputy Registrar office appointment is proposed by the Department of Public Safety, of which the Department of Vehicle Services is a part and voted on by the MN Legislature.

3.           Almost all of the Deputy Registrars belong to the Minnesota Deputy Registrar Association (MDRA) who employs a full-time lobbyist. Given that every single MN House member has a Deputy Registrar office in their area, the DRs have immense political power to maintain the status quo. Also, the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association (MADA) has a full time lobbyist and often joins MDRA in statements and press releases critical of MNLARS.

4.           As residents, we can take our business to any Deputy Registrar location however Deputy Registrar offices are guaranteed that no competing DR office will be established within a certain distance of another DR office. So, for example, the St. Paul Sears DR office is guaranteed that another DR office will not be established across the street.

5.           By statute, a Deputy Registrar MUST be involved in any vehicle title transfer operation which currently results in a $10 fee to them. Given that fact many Auto Dealers have established close ties with specific Deputy Registrars offices that must, again by law, be involved in any title transfer transaction.

6.           Several classes of vehicles (passenger vehicles and motorcycles) can be renewed online. As a resident, by law, I pay a convenience fee, making those transactions more expensive to the resident even though they are cheaper for the State of MN to process.

7.           The Deputy Registrars are responsible for their own office expenses (salaries, rent, office supplies, MDRA dues, etc.) but the State of MN provides, at no cost to the DR, all of their license and registration sticker inventory.  If an owner of a DR office does not believe the fee revenue is not adequately profitable, they can work with DVS to close down that office and allow another DR to be appointed.

8.           Prior to MNLARS, when a resident needed to complete a title transfer they went to a DR office and filled out a bunch of paperwork. The DR collected the fees and sent the stack of paper to the St. Paul DVS office for manual entry and processing. If documents were missing or there were errors with the title forms, DVS sent a letter to the individual to fix the issues resulting in delays issuing the title. After MNLARS, the Deputy Registrar entered the form information into MNLARS while the customer was present. This allowed any questions to be resolved at the DR office as well as assuring the correct documents were present to complete the transaction. An additional side benefit of MNLARS was the updated title information was immediately available to law enforcement. Prior to MNLARS, if a vehicle was involved in a crime before it was processed by DVS (45 to 60 days), law enforcement had to go to hunting through mountains of paper to locate the new owner.

9.           Prior to MNLARS, the Deputy Registrars completed a “Daily Report” that listed all of their DVS financial transactions, amounts associated with those transactions, inventory (plates or stickers) associated with the transaction, etc. After MNLARS, all of the financial and inventory information was captured in real time, which is why with certainty we as MN residents now know that all 170 DR offices were paid over $38 million in fees in the first twelve months of MNLARS.

10.         One last fact, the Deputy Registrars were given three months to train and practice on a full size, production version of MNLARS prior to the July 2017 release. During those three months we tracked the number of individual logins and the total computer traffic from the Deputy Registrar offices which is shown below. Given the magnitude of the upcoming MNLARS release we were surprised by the following graph, which showed very little Deputy Registrar training and practice traffic prior to the MNLARS launch.

In closing, the facts above are well known to the State of MN and the Department of Vehicles services, however, the Deputy Registrars have a massive advantage in any media matter. The Deputy Registrars, especially the privately-owned offices, can respond to any press release, or OpEd, in this case as they chose, whereas the employees of the State of MN are not able to easily respond to these comments. Since I am no longer an employee of the State of MN I can share this general knowledge that would be extremely difficult for the State of MN employees to share, especially given the immense political power of the MDRA and the MADA.

(But Still Makes Over $6.5 Million DAILY Directly From It)

Why Minnesota can’t get MNLARS right

As most of you who have listened to the recent news have heard, the much-maligned MNLARS (Minnesota License and Registration System) program has been front and center of many horror stories that speak of how technology has gone awry at the State of Minnesota.

How could this happen, many ask? As someone who was deeply involved with the MNLARS program for thirty months of its 10-year history, I have considerable insight to share.  Basically, there are three reasons, most of which are not obvious or outright hidden from the general public.

1. MNLARS, the state’s vehicle and titling system, is wicked complex!  It is responsible for handling over 1.8 million title transactions, issuing registrations for 6.5 million vehicles and collecting and carefully distributing more than $1.6 billion for the State of Minnesota each year.  In addition, the State of Minnesota has passed laws resulting in over 1200 unique fees which can be validly combined in tens of thousands of ways.  MNLARS is also queried by law enforcement officials more than 100,000 times per day to retrieve plate, registration and owner information.  Although those are big numbers, they only account for a small part of the complexity of the entire system.  That complexity is not unique to Minnesota.  California, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Colorado, New Mexico and Connecticut have all experienced rough implementations to total project failures for replacement DMV system projects.

• Second, the State of Minnesota, like many states, has limited technical experience in large, custom-built software development projects of this scope and scale.  I came from the financial services industry information technology area which has a very mature software development process.  When I arrived at MNLARS at the Department of Public Safety in April of 2015, there had not even been a rough sizing of how big this development effort would be, yet a due date was already set.   The project had adequate funding but not adequate employee expertise.   There was intense pressure to quickly move the project ahead towards a predefined due date.  However, at the time I was involved, the Department of Vehicle Services staff could not even tell the software developers exactly how the system needed to work, which made a successful launch difficult at best.

• Roughly 80% of all vehicle registrations and close to 100% of vehicle titles are processed in person at something called a Deputy Registrar’s (DR) office.  Most people do not know none of these DRs are state employees, but a combination of city, county and PRIVATE employees which are paid approximately $38 million in fees each year.  They have an association and an active lobbyist at the state legislature to ensure these fees are not diminished and instead annually lobby to increase those fees. The Deputy Registrars barely prepared for the MNLARS launch, perhaps because they simply did not want this to happen and in many cases feared losing a lucrative business.

In summary, the taxpayers of Minnesota, myself included, have spent more than $100 million on the MNLARS program.  Tragically MNLARS should have been built as a 21^st century, state of the art system and should have been primarily self-service.  Given the lack of desire by the State of Minnesota to move the system away from the archaic Deputy Registrars, I am fearful Minnesota might fall even further behind in an environment that is rapidly moving towards online licensing for all government processes. 

This is an issue that cannot be addressed by information technology professionals, but by the policy leaders of the State of Minnesota.

Over the years I’ve delivered hundreds of software projects into production, some big and some small, but all valuable to the organization.  As a leader I honestly didn’t care if we used Agile or Waterfall, I was only looking for the best way to deliver.

Just to cover all the bases, Waterfall as an approach was first mentioned in 1956, according to Wikipedia.  It assumes you have complete and total knowledge represented in written Requirements at the very start of the project and the remaining tasks of Design, Implementation, Verification and Maintenance are just obvious tasks to complete based on the perfect upfront requirements.   If you’ve every done any small or large construction project on your house, clearly you know this model is flawed.  In the waterfall model you’d NEVER make a second, third, fourth trip to the hardware store to get more supplies to complete your project because if you had perfect vision at the start you’d have a perfect shopping list.   In contrast, Agile assumes you have limited knowledge at the start of any project and that you’ll have to adjust as you move forward and discover various realities.  That seems more reasonable given my experience in construction projects of all kinds!

In addition to my personal experience, I’ve also talked to dozens of organizations that want all of the benefits of Agile but don’t want to change their culture, adhere to more disciplined  development approaches or really even understand the software development process changes they are about to undertake with Agile.  The most dangerous place you can lead your organization is into what is often called “Agilefall”, it’s not Agile but it’s also not Waterfall and it almost always ends very badly.

Let me take a moment and describe Agile from the 50K foot level.

At it’s heart, Agile is a metrics driven approach and there is only ONE metric you MUST care about, which is velocity.  By definition a story represents a customer requirement and story points are just an estimate of development effort to delivery a specific story.   So, velocity is the number of story points  your organization can delivery with high quality in a given period of time.  That’s your velocity.  So if you have a software requirement that breaks into 50 stories and together the team estimates it will take 300 story points to delivery those 50 stories with high quality AND the team is delivering 30 story points every week, then you are looking at 10 weeks to get those 50 stories done, right? (300 story points / 30 story points per week = 10 weeks to complete).   So why do you care about velocity?  You care because predictable delivery in software development is the gold standard.  Being able to have high confidence when a project will be delivered is extremely valuable to your organization, but you cannot know that without knowing your organizations aggregate velocity.  As I said this is a VERY high level fly over the Agile forest and we’ll explore many more nuances in the coming posts, but sadly, very few organizations know their velocity so customers are constantly disappointed.

Here’s where the leadership part comes in, if YOU’ve promised those 50 stories in 6 weeks without understanding your team’s velocity then YOU, as the leader, have to own that error and inform whoever you promised that either they have to wait longer OR they have to trim scope.  In Agile there is no “just get ‘er done” hero moves….that would be waterfall.

If as a leader you or the people you’re reporting to cannot tolerate that much honesty, then don’t do Agile.  If your teams aren’t willing to transparently track their work so everyone knows if their true velocity and if the initial estimate was close to correct, then don’t do Agile.  If you have customers who look at the software development process as a confrontational exercise with winners and losers then don’t do Agile, you’ll never get the collaboration you need to truly build the correct product.  Go back to Waterfall.

So, why SHOULD you do Agile?

If you’re in the software delivery business you’ve likely see the chart below.  It is the Chaos Report from the Standish Group.  They survey thousands of projects and quantify what makes projects successful, challenged or failures.  In this cart they have separated those metrics by development approach.  Overall Agile was more than three times more likely to be successful and three times less likely to fail that Waterfall.

I’m sure that all looks good and what wise leader or organization would pick an approach that was three times more likely to fail?  So, what’s the catch?  The catch is that to actually do Agile and do it well your culture, both business and technical,  is going to have to evolve and your going to have to actually track real development metrics and not just count the money.  Additionally, if you are a very large organization and want to scale this to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of developers you need to adapt a Agile scaling framework, such as Scaled Agile and you are going to have to eventually change your project portfolio approach.  So, it’s not easy but in addition to avoiding failure you’ll also go faster, waste less money on requirements customers really don’t want and have happier customers.

So next week we’ll explore how you get started, especially if you are a BIG organization.

Sue Rohde

Welcome to Agile and DevOps Wisdom.

I’ll start by providing you a bit of background on who I am and what I’ve done over the past several decades, which is where all the wisdom comes from.

I started as a true geek and am a great lover of information technology but for over 13 years I’ve been responsible to leading large organizations that deliver custom software projects via an Agile development approach, most recently using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) www.scaledagileframework.com .  Additionally I’ve led several very large organizations to help them migrate to DevOps, so I have real “boots on the ground” experience.  I am always truly amazed at how often I get approached by a harried executive that has a project in trouble and is looking towards Agile as the silver bullet.  That said, Agile done well, is a powerful instrument to 21st century change and its also a substantial organizational change.

This blog is dedicated to the customer and technology leadership that wants to make the organizational journey to Agile and/or DevOps.  I’m happy to share my hard learned lessons with the sincere hope you can avoid some of the most common mistakes I’ve seen over the years.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you come back often.

Sue Rohde